Supplying and funding the court

Economic relations between Iberian courts and urban societies in the later middle ages

27NOVEMBER - 28NOVEMBER 2014
Valencia
Symposium

Coord.: Alexandra BEAUCHAMP (Université de Limoges), Antoni FURIÓ (Universitat de València)
Org.: Universitat de València, École des hautes études hispaniques et ibériques (Casa de Velázquez, Madrid)
Coll.: Proyecto «Una capital medieval y su área de influencia. El impacto económico y político de la ciudad de Valencia sobre el conjunto del reino en la Baja Edad Media», HAR 2011-28718 del Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Cultures i Societats de l'Edat Mitjana (València), EA 4270 (CRIHAM, Limoges)

Place:
Sala de Juntes
Facultat de Geografia i Història-Universitat de València
Avda. Blasco Ibáñez, 28
46010 Valencia

 

Presentation

Economic history, despite several criticisms about its presumable historiographical crisis, displays an enviable vitality, which is evident through a number of projects, meetings and publications about this discipline. As far as the middle ages are concerned, it is worth stressing the existence of recent major international projects upon economic growth, wealth circulation, credit and indebtedness, famine and inflation, public finances and urban taxation. Particularly within medieval economic history, one the fields upon which such a vitality has been perhaps more clearly perceived has been urban history, not only in institutional –fiscal and financial– aspects or those concerning production, such as trade and manufacture, but very especially in the issue which represented the main preoccupation of urban authorities: supplying the city. Feeding the city was not only a major urban issue –especially in cities with thousands of inhabitants devoted to non-agricultural activities– but also a colossal business for the merchants in charge of ensuring the arrival of provisions; and in turn, feeding the city was the name of a research project that developed originally in London during the 1990s, which has been applied to other European cities thereafter, such as Valencia from 2012 to 2014.

Such an interest for urban economies contrasts with the scarce attention historians have paid to the economy of royal and noble courts. History of courts, the supreme space for political power, seems to have been neglected during the first half of the twentieth century due to the disrepute of political and institutional history. This negative notion began to change, firstly, due to Norbert Elias’ contributions, which stressed the role of the court over culture and social behaviours and practice of elites, and afterwards reinforced by the historiographical renewal embodied by new political history and its decisive interest in ‘the political’, rather than in politics. However, one needs to wait to the late twentieth century to witness the first economically focused studies on the court, which can be seen in the works by Maurice Aymard and Marzio Achille Romani (1998). These draw on analytical concepts based upon economic anthropology, such as ‘prestige economy’, ‘sumptuary expense’ and ‘conspicuous destruction of wealth’. More recent contributions have been developed by Gerhard Fouquet, Jan Hirschbiegel and Werner Paravicini in the 2008, which have led them to talk about Hofwirtschaft (‘court economy’) as a concept in itself. Therefore, a new path that understands the court as an economic institution has made its way among historians, which attempts to fulfill several aims:

• Studying administrative, institutional and bureaucratic characteristics of economic and financial the economic organisation of the court.
• Analysing its economic role within the context of royal and nobel finances, especially in relation to the political repercussion of economic distribution among the members of the court –i.e. gifts, grants and the like.
• Highlighting the notion of ‘purchasing power society’ of the elites that formed the court.
• Stressing the chronic court indebtedness and its repercussion for the royal and noble power in general terms.
• Analising the economic reasons –self-consumption, taxation– that can explain court roaming, as well as the opposite phenomenon, that is the progressive sedentarisation of courts, which has been rarely studied at the same level than the role of political justification. 
• Studying the relations between the court and the luxury economy, interpreting the relevance of this sort of consumption in such a hierarchised society as the court one, in which symbolism and representation of social order and power depicted a central role. 

All these aspects have been constituting new research fields developed essentially from the viewpoint of the monarchy and the nobility, focused primarily on the ‘political economy’ of the court. Contrarily, the court –insofar as a human organism– relations with their urban environment, with the city in which stays or transits, have been far less taken into account. This issue has only been addressed in the case of Flanders and, more recently, in the conference Paris, ville de cour, in 2014. This relation between the court and the city which hosts it, that is between the royal or noble courts and the townspeople, is what we will address in the conference, covering from the supplying to the funding of the city. This is especially relevant if we bear in mind that, although Iberian courts had not completely sedentarised at the end of the middle ages, they however had prolonged their visits to the cities of their kingdoms in terms of time. Therefore, the conference will be focusing especially on the following aspects:


• The economic preconditions which were necessary for the settlement of a particular court in a city, such as the multiplicity of economic activities, the market dynamism and other aspects which permitted supplying and funding their everyday activities.
• The impact of the presence of courts over the economic life of towns, that is to explore which interest had townspeople in their presence, how they could be profited from them and which difficulties could emerge as a result.
• The contribution of towns to the sumptuous ‘train de vie’ of the court.
• The potential competition between towns in economic terms to attract particular courts in a given moment. 

These aspects will be studied both from the scope of big cities –regional capitals– and small- and medium-sized ones, in which the court only ‘passes’ or stops very temporarily, paying attention to:

• The products and goods ordered and handed over the court. In that sense, it will be also studied the degree of coordination between urban local production to court consumption, as well as the need to import further merchandises alien to local markets and their potential reasons, such as the role of fashion, taste and the absence of local production or trade. The influence and impact of court consumption over the market and the townspeople consumption itself will be also addressed –i.e. prices and labour market evolution, development of fashion or new local productions, the problem of the ‘gift’ in its anthropological notion, etc.
• Craftsmen and merchants in relation to the court: direct relations? The role of towns (norm, intermediary, control). An economic dialogue among elites?
• Money: court finance mechanisms and circuits –loans/ indebtedness/ donations, Aragonese cena, Castilian yantar, Portuguese jantar or colheita.
• Prices: how far the presence of a court influenced market prices –i.e. those concerning the supplying, hosting or money itself?
• Which are the urban institutional and political reactions –on the part of urban councils, guilds and so on– to the presence courts and their economic consequences?


We would like to remind to all candidates that this conference does not intend to study the political or institutional relations between towns, nor between the royal or noble power and their officials. The interest is on the economic –material, commercial, financial– relationships between towns and townsmen, on the one hand, and the courts –insofar as society, as the group of servants and courtiers that lived in the direct environment of the king or the nobility– on the other, focusing especially on the contribution of towns to the supplying and funding of the court and its personnel.

Finally, we remind that the period of study is restricted to the later middle ages, when the courts began their sedentarisation and, moreover, when accounting books and income-and-expense registers proliferated in such a way that makes possible the analysis of the economic relations that we purpose in this conference. And we also remind that our geographic scope are the Iberian kingdoms –Crown of Aragon, Castile, Navarre and Portugal–, although in the case of the Crown of Aragon their non-Iberian states –Sardinia, Naples and Sicily– will also be included.

 

 

 

PODCASTS
01/03/2022 - Espagnol